Learning and Memorizing
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
— Dr. Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!
To learn anything, you must be able to remember and retain it. This is done with the skill and ability to access your memory. Duh! We all know this. Where is the good stuff? Don’t worry — we’re almost there. Here are the two techniques I use that dramatically increase my ability to learn and remember anything.
Technique #1: Create a relationship between two or more things
“Learning is the creation of a relationship between two or more things,” says Tony Robbins. So, your ability to create relationships between things in your mind will dramatically increase your ability to learn at a much faster rate. When you do this, you can learn and remember anything with great effectiveness almost instantly, in some cases. An example of creating a relationship to learn or remember is putting things in the form of an analogy or metaphor. Analogies and metaphors are some of the most powerful ways to learn, remember, influence, and persuade people. You may recall many analogies or metaphors that you’ve heard in your life that were a great tool for your ability to create relationships between things. I would bet you’ve heard the saying, “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Sports metaphors for life are abundant. As in life and in sports, teamwork, leadership, discipline, hard work, passion, strategic thinking, accepting constructive criticism, and love for the game are all huge factors in determining your results. You must build your skills in all these areas, and others, if you want to be successful. People who play team sports gain valuable life lessons that some who never play a sport may miss out on — especially those who play team sports at a young age.
Technique #2: To increase your memory and speed of learning, use visualization strategies to create an image in your mind of what you want to remember.
When you look in any direction, your eyes, which are visual receptors, send signals to the brain which allow it to pick up on many different images. It then deciphers what the images mean and how you perceive these images. You may focus on one thing, but, whether you’re conscious of it or not, your brain is still picking up everything within your field of vision. Everything you look at gets stored somewhere in your brain. You can harness the ability to reach these memories of images at any time. When you look at a picture of your house, you would recognize it in a second. You may have never consciously focused on every detail of the exterior of your house, but, still, your brain takes everything in at once, regardless of what you focus on.
Practice looking at any object, and focus on it. Then, while you’re focused on the object, start describing everything else in your field of vision while you maintain focus on the object. You can strengthen your awareness of mental focus with this little exercise. It will keep you from getting tunnel vision and increase your awareness and consciousness of what’s going on around you. Another visual technique is to say the word “knowledge” and then close your eyes and say it again. You should see the word “knowledge” visually in your mind. Try saying your name or a friend’s name for which you know the exact spelling. When you close your eyes and say the name, it almost magically appears as an image, and you see the name written out in your mind.
When you’ve harnessed this skill and technique, memorizing becomes so much easier, especially with shorter items like phone numbers, names, and addresses. Lengthier items, like pages of a book, a whole document, or sheet music to a song are more difficult but not impossible. The trick is just practicing it and becoming more aware and in control of it so you can begin using it to your advantage. If you work on it for at least an hour a day, eventually, you can become great, if not outstanding, at anything. I say “eventually” because each individual’s personal power and commitment is different. What takes one person a certain amount of time may take another person way longer. So don’t allow time to ever be a constraint. That’s external. Our results in life are determined by how we internally handle every external situation. So time is never an excuse. We should not allow ourselves to be distracted or deceived by time constraints. No matter your age, you still have a chance at successfully achieving any goal you desire to accomplish. Go out and make it happen!
Random Fact
There are 200,000,000 insects for every one human.
